Please go grab it, tell your friends, etc. This really means a lot to me and I’m super-excited, and I’d love to harness this opportunity to get it higher in even bigger categories to get some real visibility. I don’t like getting all sales-pitch-y, but it’s actually pretty hilarious and readers are loving it. More on that below. Click here to get it.

Sorry to go incommunicado on you. May kind of snuck up and pounced. Also I have so many cool things going on that I didn’t even know where to start, so apparently I didn’t, but that’s no way to live. So here’s a quick rundown for now.

The Stone and the Song is free this weekend! If you like fairy tales, lyrical writing, living(ish) statues, or stories where the heroine does as much rescuing as the hero, now’s your chance to snap it up. (Click here to get it on Amazon.)

Super-cool sidenote: Last weekend was the first free promo I’ve ever done. The Stone and the Song hit #1 Free in Fairy Tales within 24 hours, and stayed there until the end of the promo! This time around it’s been hovering around the Top 10 so far, even without much promotion. Also got my first reviews from strangers, I’m pretty sure, including its 10th 5-star review!

Pints & Prose is live! I’m one of the founding editors and art director for Pints & Prose, a Baltimore-based creative laboratory. We’ve hosted local gatherings for years, and we officially launched our online presence earlier this month. It’s a place for writers, thinkers, and creators to create great work, enjoy it together, and share it with the world. I haven’t said anything about it because I didn’t want to be premature, but it’s been super-hard to stay quiet on this one. But now we’re live, and there are already some fantastic articles up, including a piece about why sports needs villains and a couple perspectives on the recent Baltimore riots. Check it out at pintsandprose.com!

The pocket edition is in my actual pocket!

Are you creative? We’re also looking for guest contributors, so if you’ve got great creative work to share with the world, submit it here and we’ll take a look.

Bill and I launched our new series, Hubris Towers! I feel like I haven’t shut up about this one, so I won’t go into it at length. Short version: I think it’s one of the funniest things I’ve written lately. Early reviews seem to agree. Also the pocket edition is so cool! Learn more here or buy it on Nook, Kobo, or Amazon (US | Int’l).

Protip: Buy the pocket edition on Amazon and you get the Kindle edition free!

Brilliant!

I’m so grateful, as ever, to have you all along for the ride. Big things are happening, people. Leave a comment and let me know how you’re doing. I miss you.

I have a couple really exciting things to share soon, but I’m exerting all of my patience to wait until they’re actually ready. In the meantime, I’ve added a new preview page for The Dream World Collective at byfaroe.com/dwc. You can get a story synopsis and read a free sample. I’ll be developing it a little more in the near future, with access to even more free chapters, so stay tuned. If you have any ideas about how to make the page prettier, more interesting, or more useful, please let me know in comments. Thanks!

Also, the first episode of Hubris Towers is rapidly approaching! So excited! It’s one of the funniest things I’ve written in a long time. Oh, man. I can’t wait. You’re going to get to meet Billiam! You’re—Ok. Patience. All will be revealed soon enough.

You can sign up for Hubris Towers updates here. Everyone on the list will get a note about a super-secret launch deal that’s going to disappear before we announce the launch publicly. So go do that thing.

The Argent Star

Living on the last surviving island on Earth, Ren has put herself on the path to become an archaeologist. She’s defied her father’s wishes and gone out on her own, barely keeping in contact with him as he commands an army somewhere across the universe. And it was all going well until her brother Elian discovered a planet.

Lost for centuries, Novae was thought to be a legend. It vanished years ago and since being rediscovered the Monarchy has stepped in to take over. What Ren didn’t realize was that she and Elian and their father are the chosen leaders of Novae, thanks to a scorched piece of paper that claimed her ancestor named the star Novae orbits.

With suspicion and doubt, Ren is forced leave her life on Earth to go to Novae with her estranged father and rule over the planet she doesn’t think wants her there. Her suspicions are confirmed when she learns there are insurgents hiding in the darkened forests, and her father assigns her a guardian, Sheridan; a woman with a threatening gaze and silent steps.

Now Ren is just trying to stay alive long enough to figure out what the Monarchy is planning for the planet, because she doesn’t believe that they’re on Novae for the good of the people. But going against the Monarchy means going against a government that spans across galaxies, and Ren doesn’t know if she’ll be enough.

Novae is already at civil war that gets worse with each passing day. Ren doesn’t have long before the Monarchy decides to “neutralize” the threat. Will she be able to stop the hostile takeover? Or will her actions ignite a rebellion across the universe?

I’m starting to plan out a couple upcoming projects and I’d love your feedback. Two of them will probably be released in serial form (episodes released regularly then bundled into books or seasons) and I want to figure out what will give the best reader experience.

I’m really excited about the projects. They are, in no particular order:

The Dream World Collective, which you can currently read for free here. It’s kind of like Friends with more art, geekery, and tea.

Hubris Towers, still very early in the process but looking hilarious. It’s leaning toward sort of a comedy of manners meets comedy of errors in the tradition (I hope) of P. G. Wodehouse. “Luxury Living at Hubris Towers: Isn’t it time you got what you really deserve?”

Here’s what I’m trying to figure out about how to structure them. What do you think? Please leave me a comment – I’d love to hear from you!

I did finish Kitchen Adventures, the hardest part of my patron-only January Bonus Bundle. And it turned out hilarious. Among other things, Otto coined the term (or maybe it’s a real one he knows and I don’t) gruemelliere, which he alleges is French for gruelsmith. Maybe you had to be there.

In any case, that’s done but I still have to finish Sushi’s character sketch and an episode of A Modest Contribution on the history of the moustache—my rule for these is that I can’t do any research beforehand, nor can the characters. History is written by the quick-witted.

The really good news, though, is that I finished the entire manuscript edit for The Stone and the Song, including a few key plot tweaks and clarifications and about 20,000 words of editing. Brilliant! The editing is usually quick with me, as I have a pretty good eye for it and tend to write fairly polished prose anyway, but I was nervous about the plot fixes and not sure how much time they’d end up taking.

Today I don’t have as much time to give to writing work, but I’d like to at least knock out the rest of the bonus bundle. That’s about 1,000 easy words for A Modest Contribution plus a pretty unpredictable word count and formatting time for Sushi’s excerpt. Stretch goal is to also finish the CTAs and Dream World Collective excerpt for Stone & Song. If I can get that done I could conceivably have the book up for pre-order tonight. Tonight! We’ll see.

Ok, everyone, pick one of your favorite authors. I know, it’s impossible to pick just one. You can do this a few times if you really have to. But one author at a time. Ready with your first one?

Now imagine that author is willing to create, reveal, write, or do something special for you and your fellow readers and you get to pick what it is. What would you ask for? (And, out of curiosity, who’s the author?)

Personally, I’d ask P. G. Wodehouse to develop a board or card game that captures the fun and hijinks of Jeeves & Wooster. I’d ask Terry Pratchett for a sort of travel guide to Ankh-Morpork, complete with descriptions of notable shops and guilds and what you would find there. And, while it’s technically not scalable and would do my fellow readers no good, I’d ask C. S. Lewis for a long chat in a pub with a few good friends.